Archive for “October, 2013”

In my new role at SAP, I am part of the team that puts together the amazing SAP TechEd events. This past week I had the great pleasure of kicking off TechEd Las Vegas (next week it will be TechEd Amsterdam, and early December we’ll be in India for TechEd Bangalore…) I can’t possibly do this tremendous event justice in one short blog post (hundreds of hours of educational content, 6500 live attendees, over 20,000 online, the events reach a total of over 200,000) and many others have posted their own thoughts and personal highlights. However, I would like to share a couple of small, but very interesting “Ah-HA!” moments I experienced over the course of the event – one of the things that makes attending great conferences and speaking with smart people such a joy. (think the Serendipity Economy).

The “digital layer” is a given at conferences – but now attendees want to take their content home

This was a really interesting one. It’s been a given for a while now that conferences must have robust digital layers to meet attendee (and online lurker) audience expectations. No surprises there. But what happens when attendees have an amazing augmented experience via a highly useful mobile app? When they share pictures, make comments and connect with others – and then want to take that content home, or into another platform? During a lunch with the SAP TechEd app leaderboard winners (those who had used the event app the most) we had a lively discussion about how the content these folks had created could be exported from the mobile into a desktop (“If I could even get a Word document…”) or online experience (“What about if we could bring the content into an SCN forum thread?”). It was a great question that I had never heard asked before – and I expect it to come up again as the lines between online, offline and IRL continue to blur.

Finally, this is my favourite picture of all from the event, and I would like to know just how one comes to own their own personal SAP t-shirt cannon?? Sign me up!

So, two small (but interesting) discussion points from a rich, lively event that had thousands of attendees. If you attended or watched online, what did you come away with from #SAPTechEd? I’d love to hear in the comments below.